Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

June 20, 2005

Thanks to all who've been linking to and commenting on the Columbia Journalism Review's "watercooler" interview with me, about why I quit CNN and what I'm doing now with Global Voices and so forth. I've been getting a lot of email about it (all positive so far).

'It's not my place to make their laws," Scoble writes on his blog. ''It
certainly is not my right to force their hand with business power. Any
more than it's their place to make American laws."

Rubbish, MacKinnon replies.

''By not agreeing to comply with
filtering requirements, you're not forcing the Chinese to do anything,"
she said. ''You're just not playing along with their game."

Indeed,
MacKinnon said that Microsoft and other Internet companies should
flatly refuse to comply with the Chinese government's filtering
standards, and not only out of a love of free speech.

''We're
getting into a national security issue," she fretted. MacKinnon fears
that our support of Chinese censorship is storing up trouble for the
United States in years to come, in the same way that our tolerance of
Saudi fanaticism is now paying such ugly dividends.

Consider the
case of Taiwan. Most Chinese support their country's bellicose attitude
toward their ''rebellious province." But MacKinnon thinks this is
largely because the Chinese get so little accurate information about
Taiwan, through the Internet or any other media. ''If you did have a
free exchange of opinion," she said, ''maybe more people on the
mainland might say, you know, let's let those Taiwanese do what they
want."

Instead, Taiwan is demonized, and the masses cheer their
leaders' belligerent posturing. All in all, it's a good way to start a
war. And US Internet companies would share some of the blame, in
MacKinnon's view, for helping Beijing keep its citizens in the dark.

''This comes down as their larger responsibility as Americans," MacKinnon said.

November 09, 2004

Foreign Policy magazine's November/December 2004 issue mentions North Korea zone and my "Worldwide Conversation" paper in an article titled "Web of Influence." The article describes the way in which blogs are an increasingly influential and important part of the discourse on foreign policy issues.